Editor Brian Harrod Provides Comprehensive up-to-date news coverage, with aggregated news from sources all over the world from the Roundup Newswires Network
This is the most remarkable account so far of Putin’s rise from a KGB operative to deadly agent provocateur in the hated west
In 1985, a young KGB officer arrived in provincial East Germany. His name was Vladimir Putin. What exactly Putin got up to in Dresden is a mystery. The official version says not much: he drank beer, put on weight, lived in an ordinary apartment with his wife, Lyudmila, and their two daughters. While other Soviet spies were having adventures, Putin – so the story goes – sat out the late cold war in a paper-shuffling backwater.
The investigative journalist and former Financial Times reporter Catherine Belton has dug deeper. Her groundbreaking book, Putin’s People: How the KGB Took Back Russia and then Took on the West, offers a far more terrifying version. Putin was a senior liaison officer with the Stasi, East Germany’s secret police, she suggests. And Dresden was a key base for KGB operations, including murderous ones, in which Putin allegedly played a direct part.
For the first time, the world’s chemical weapons watchdog has directly accused Syria’s leadership of ordering illegal attacks on its people
There is a temptation, to which some European governments and politicians are prey, to imagine that Syria’s civil war is over. It would, after all, be politically convenient if the millions of refugees languishing in Turkey and Jordan were to go home, rather than serve as a constant reminder of the EU’s chronic fear of migrants.
An end to the war would remove a prime cause of instability in the Levant and eastern Mediterranean region. Russia and Iran would have less excuse to play games of geopolitical chance with civilian lives. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey’s irascible president, would have less to complain about.
Videos on social media show buildings alight in prison near Angarsk near Lake Baikal
Fire has engulfed a penal colony in Siberia after a riot broke out – reportedly sparked by accusations of brutality.
Videos posted to social media on Friday showed buildings ablaze at the IK-15 prison in the Siberian city of Angarsk, 2,500 miles southeast of Moscow and near Lake Baikal’s southern shore
Senior officials laid wreaths on Friday at a monument in the capital, Warsaw, to honour the late president Lech Kaczynski, who died. They walked in single file, guarded by police wearing surgical masks.
Statue of Marshal Ivan Konev in Prague seen by some as symbol of communist rule
Russia has opened a criminal investigation after Czech authorities dismantled the statue of a Soviet military commander despite Moscow’s protests, escalating a diplomatic row over the issue.
Attorney general asserts that investigation into ties between the Trump campaign and Russia was ‘without basis’, despite evidence
William Barr has said without evidence that he believes the Russia investigation that shadowed Donald Trump for the first two years of his administration was started without any basis and amounted to an effort to “sabotage the presidency”, he said in an interview with Fox News Channel that aired on Thursday.
The attorney general offered no support for his assertion that the FBI lacked a basis for opening the investigation and made no mention of the fact that the bureau began its investigation after a Trump campaign adviser purported to have early knowledge that Russia had dirt on his Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton.
Mexico holds out against scale of reductions which would amount to 10m barrels per day, or 10% of global supply
Opec countries and allies led by Russia have agreed in principle to cut their oil output by more than a fifth and said they expected the United States and other producers to join in their effort to prop up prices hammered in the coronavirus crisis.
But there was some confusion after Mexico apparently refused to sign up to its share of cuts under the deal, which would have been 400,000 barrels per day. The Mexican energy minister Rocio Nahle Garcia tweeted that her country had suggested a cut of 100,000 barrels.
Vladimir Putin has taken a backseat in tackling Russia’s coronavirus outbreak, working remotely from his residence in the Moscow suburbs and delegating powers that he has spent a generation mostly accumulating in the Kremlin.
Strict quarantine measures and border closures have been imposed by trusted lieutenants including the Moscow mayor, Sergei Sobyanin, and the new prime minister, Mikhail Mishustin, with officials leading parallel efforts to contain the virus and its economic fallout.
Report by UN-aligned body that oversees chemical weapons use is hailed by rights groups
The UN-aligned body that oversees chemical weapons use has for the first time blamed the Syrian regime for using sarin gas on the battlefield in a report hailed by rights groups as a landmark moment with implications for war crimes investigations.
The report, released on Wednesday by the Organisation for the Prevention of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), accuses the Syrian Air Force of twice using sarin to attack the town of Ltamenah in late March 2017. It also found that regime aircraft had bombed the same town with chlorine gas in the same week.
Report says ‘government of Syria and/or its allies’ carried out strikes on hospitals and school
A UN investigation has stopped short of directly calling Russia a perpetrator in attacks on hospitals and other humanitarian infrastructure in rebel-held areas of Syria, a move greeted with disappointment from rights groups.
A summary of a 185-page internal report submitted to the UN security council on Monday said that in five of seven cases studied – among them four medical sites, a school and a children’s centre – “the government of Syria and/or its allies had carried out the airstrike”, but it did not explicitly name Russia, Bashar al-Assad’s most important military and political ally.
Russia is holding rehearsals for its Victory Day parade, scheduled for 9 May despite the coronavirus crisis, as the Kremlin resists cancelling a patriotic holiday with major political significance.
The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, is supposed to host France’s Emmanuel Macron and other world leaders at a military parade to mark the 75th anniversary of the end of the second world war. The event is a significant historical landmark for Russia and a coveted photo opportunity to claim Putin’s re-emergence from political isolation in the west.
Mike Pompeo and Mark Esper agreed to proceed with US withdrawal of Open Skies Treaty despite pandemic, sources say
The Trump administration is determined to withdraw from a 28-year-old treaty intended to reduce the risk of an accidental war between the west and Russia by allowing reconnaissance flights over each other’s territory.
Despite the coronavirus pandemic, which has put off a full national security council (NSC) meeting on the Open Skies Treaty (OST), the secretary of defence, Mark Esper, and secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, have agreed to proceed with a US exit, according to two sources familiar with administration planning.
We are about to wrap up our coverage on this blog for the day, but you can follow all developments on our new global live blog here. In the interim, you can catch up on all the day’s latest news here, on our latest At a Glance:
The European Commission has proposed a short-time work scheme to avoid mass lay-offs across the bloc during the coronavirus pandemic.
The scheme, which is modelled on Germany’s Kurzabeit programme, was announced by Commission head Ursula von der Leyen in a video message.
Companies are paying salaries to their employees, even if, right now, they are not making money. Europe is now coming to their support, with a new initiative.
“It is intended to help Italy, Spain and all other countries that have been hard hit. And it will do so thanks to the solidarity of other member states,” she said.
Italy has extended lockdown restrictions until 13 April as signs emerge indicating the coronavirus contagion might be reaching a “plateau”.
“Italians have shown great maturity,” Roberto Speranza, the health minister, told parliament on Wednesday. “Experts say we are on the right track, and that the drastic measures taken are starting to give results.”
However, Speranza warned “we must not drop our guard” as the recovery will be “prudent and gradual”.
“It would be unforgiveable to mistake this first result for a definitive defeat of Covid, it’s a long battle.”
The number of new confirmed infections rose by 2,107 on Tuesday, taking the total number of current cases to 77,635, according to figures from Italy’s civil protection authority.
The rise in infections was higher than the daily increase registered on Monday (1,648), but lower than Sunday’s increase of 3,815.
On Tuesday, there was a 2.8% increase in new (i.e current) infections, compared with an average daily rise of 15% during one of the most critical weeks.
The death toll rose by 837 on Tuesday to 12,428, higher than the 812 deaths registered on Monday. The number of people who have recovered from the virus rose by 1,109 to 15,729 on Tuesday, following a record leap of 1,590 on Monday.
The daily death toll and infection rate have also started to slow in Lombardy, the region worst-affected by the virus.
“The curve tells us that we’re at a plateau,” said Silvio Brusaferro, the president of the Higher Health Institute (ISS).
Hungary’s PM insists extreme measures are only to fight the pandemic, others are not so sure
The coronavirus has already overwhelmed medical services, grounded flights and halted economic growth, but one of its most enduring effects could be to usher in a political age in which soft authoritarians have turned harder, and the surveillance state becomes a way of life even in some democracies.
In Hungary, after a set of measures introduced on Monday, it is now a criminal offence to spread misinformation about coronavirus, and the prime minister, Viktor Orbán, can rule by decree for an indefinite period. In neighbouring Serbia, soldiers patrol the streets as part of the coronavirus response plan. In Moscow, authorities are reportedly mulling measures that would require everyone who wants to go outside to submit the reasons online, and then be tracked via their smartphones.
Do you ever run out of questions, you people? Trump asks a room full of reporters.
Trump is talking about the impeachment. “They probably illegally impeached me... you don’t hear much about that nowadays because everyone’s talking about the virus,” which he is happy about, the US president says.
“The democrats their whole live their whole being their whole existence was to try and get me out of office any way they can even if it was a phony deal.”
"I think I'm getting A pluses now for how I handled myself during a phony impeachment," Trump says.
Kremlin-backed channel fails to overturn Ofcom ruling that also related to Syria coverage
The Kremlin-backed news channel RT has lost a high court challenge to overturn a ruling by the UK media regulator that it broadcast biased programmes relating to the novichok poisoning in Salisbury and the war in Syria.
Ofcom fined RT £200,000 after determining that seven programmes, including two presented by the former MP George Galloway, were in breach of UK broadcasting rules relating to due impartiality regarding matters of political controversy.
Seven ships remained off UK coast for unusually long time this month
Nine Royal Navy ships were involved in a major operation shadowing seven Russian vessels who had lingered in the Channel for several days this month as the coronavirus crisis was beginning to worsen in the UK.
The unusually high level of Russian activity concluded about a week and a half ago and navy officials said they believed it was primarily a response to western exercises in Europe rather than to a perception that the disease was leaving the UK vulnerable.
US tsunami warning centre says quake capable of generating destructive wave
A 7.5-magnitude earthquake hit off Russia’s Kuril Islands on Wednesday, the US Geological Survey said, prompting a tsunami warning.
The quake hit at a depth of 59km (37 miles), around 1,400km north-east of the Japanese city of Sapporo, USGS added. There were no early reports of casualties.
Russia may be forced to put off a public vote on amendments allowing Vladimir Putin to hold office potentially until 2036 as the coronavirus threatens to upend a busy political season in Russia.
The Kremlin so far has not rescheduled the 22 April vote that was intended as a public endorsement for Putin’s surprise plan to “reset” his term limits, allowing him to run for a fifth or even sixth term as president under a revised constitution.